The Steam Deck is still on track for a February launch, Valve reaffirms.
Valve recently posted an extensive blog post detailing the latest goings on surrounding the Steam Deck as the company headed into 2022. "First and foremost, we’re on track to ship Steam Deck on time," Valve began, before adding that "global pandemic, supply issues, and shipping issues notwithstanding," it should begin shipping Steam Decks by the end of February.
This all comes after the Steam Deck was originally delayed out of launching last month in December 2021. In mid-November, Valve announced that it would be pushing the launch date of the new hardware back by two months to February 2021, chiefly due to material shortages brought about by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Now though, Valve also announced that "work and testing" for the Steam Deck Verified program is underway. Just yesterday, Portal 2 became the first game to join the Steam Deck Verified initiative, basically meaning that Valve has performed extensive tests with the game, and determined that it operates fully as intended on the new hardware with no restrictions.
It's reassuring that we're getting these updates from Valve now, with little over a month to go until the planned launch in February next month. However, from the phrasing of Valve's announcement, it sounds like the new hardware won't be launching until the very end of February, as that's when Valve plans to get them "out the door" around then.
For what we made of Valve's new hardware when we got to play it for ourselves, you can head over to our complete Steam Deck preview for more.
